For future quakes, Japan learned from Kobe

NAGAOKA, JAPAN -- Kobe was a learning experience for Japan. Earthquakes and community resuscitation always are.

The question is never whether to rebuild, but how best to do it. Earthquakes are no more avoidable in Japan than are hurricanes on the Gulf Coast.

Japan is riven with active faults. Four of them converge on Tokyo, which lost 140,000 lives in the 1923 quake and whose next brush with a big-time seismic event, predicted to occur at any time in the next 50 years or so, is expected to be the planet's first trillion-dollar catastrophe. Seismologists consider Osaka, Japan's second-largest population center, another disaster waiting to happen.

A 2004 quake outside Nagaoka was relatively minor at about 6.0 on the Richter scale. But for the cluster of hamlets scattered along mountain ridges some 30 miles out of town, it was nothing less than devastating.

Softened by Pacific typhoon rains that had crossed Japan weeks earlier, whole mountainsides slid down into settled glens and dales, splintering houses or shoving them aside and destroying the ponds that are essential to the region's most valued industry: raising koi, the ornamental fish prized by gardeners and landscape architects from Riyadh to New Orleans, as well as in the temple gardens of Japan.

Villagers evacuate

Even the houses that had not been destroyed were untenable. The web of switchbacks and one-lane trails that carried traffic in and out of the district was gone, and backed-up rivers threatened to burst through the banks of mud that had clogged them. The village known as Yamakoshi -- actually a collection of five small settlements, or wards -- had no choice other than evacuation, but Kobe's experience with this sort of thing had inspired the government to offer a much richer array of options than were available in 1995.

Buyouts were one choice, resettlement was another.

Abandonment was not seriously considered, though provision was made to move some housing clusters to less vulnerable parts of the village. And with that basic set of agreements in place, the government rolled up its sleeves and set to work on the hugely complex and expensive business of shoring up and redesigning the fallen valleys, rechanneling clogged rivers and rebuilding the road system -- all this for a population of about 2,200 whose total worldly assets cannot be but a fraction of reconstruction costs currently estimated at more than $1 billion.

No longer bashful about direct aid to victims, the government offered up to $30,000 per household for demolition and site preparation, plus another $10,000 for repair work. Three of Yamakoshi's five wards decided to forgo the repair money in favor of another option, moving en masse to a temporary housing encampment called Yokodai.

Within 40 days, in a field a few miles west of Nagaoka, workers had bolted together the neat grid of 200 oblong metal boxes, each about the size of a railroad freight car and most of them divided into two housing units. No one would call it a pretty landscape, though potted plants have cropped up indoors and out, and many residents have customized and winterized their digs by building storage sheds of corrugated plastic around doors and windows.

Moving to Yokodai was a vote for community among people who had sensed, if they did not need to be told, that the shattering of Kobe's old neighborhoods during the move to temporary housing nine years earlier had been in its way as destructive as the earthquake.

The Japanese word is kodokushi -- the lonely death -- and it is as dreaded as it was common among Kobe's evacuees. Death in Japan is a passage no less ritualized and collective in spirit than in the New Orleans of jazz funerals and family crypts. If kodokushi is a personal misery, it is also a social failing. Japanese are not supposed to die alone, their corpses undetected for days. And yet that's what had happened to many evacuees dispersed by the Kobe quake.

Resilient spirits

The decision to move to Yokodai was an effort by Yamakoshi residents to maintain the kind of social connections that guard against lonely death and also assure a more vigorous and successful community life.

Yokodai, which will remain an encampment for at least another year, houses neighbors alongside neighbors and keeps them focused on rebuilding Yamakoshi. Across the road from the tight grid of trailers, a large field one day slated for a housing development has been converted temporarily to gardens big enough for Yokodai's residents to supply themselves with the greens, daikon and other staples of a rural Japanese diet. Daily caravans carry the evacuees across the valley and up into the mountains where they work on their Yamakoshi homesteads and koi farms.

Back at the trailer camp, volunteers check in on residents from time to time to make sure their morale is not flagging. Those who seem troubled or isolated are coaxed out to take tea with the community or participate in other group events. There has not been a single instance of kodokushi, according to Hisakazu Ohira, a counselor assigned to Yokodai by the prefecture.

Tomo Yoshio needs no coaxing. Widowed for 16 years and with her son and five daughters long since fledged to careers in Tokyo, she delights in the community in exile that she and her neighbors have created for themselves at Yokodai. Her living quarters, occupying about a quarter of the unit she shares with another tenant, are tiny, but then so is she, a round little woman barely 4 ½ feet tall.

At 84, Yoshio is quick-witted, quick-footed and full of mirth. Ask her where she sleeps and she points not at the fold-out bed laden inconveniently with stored books and kitchenware but to the thin mat that runs right under her low table, the only piece of furniture in the 200-square-foot apartment.

Is she happy in such cramped quarters and so far from the village where she spent her life? She winks impishly and makes a confession: "I am not sure I want to go back," she says. "I have been spoiled here by having everything so close."

. . . . . . .

Jed Horne can be reached at jhorne@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3341.